‘On the yes side, under the umbrellas of all-and-no-party groups, vigorous discussions are producing real policy innovation.’ Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

A year into the Scottish independence campaign, and with one more year to go, it can seem – from a yes supporter's side – that we are almost exactly where we were.

Last Sunday's poll in a Scottish broadsheet confirmed what most of the psephology has been saying over the last 12 months. The majority still favour a no vote, by about 60-40 – but those undecided are numerous enough to make the referendum winnable for the pro-independence movement (or alternately, to provide a crushing victory for the no camp).

So far, the culture of the debate has been Scottish Enlightenment-lite: ramped-up editorial in the papers and among broadcasters, rashes of serious hustings in community halls, academics moving their heavy artillery into place. This nation is in conversation, not conflagration. Anyone who recalls the douce calmness of Edinburgh on referendum day in 1997, which re-established the Scots parliament through an act of devolution, won't be surprised at the general even-temperedness (barring, of course, the usual social-media incontinents).

The comparison with Catalonia's sovereignty movement, similarly accelerated by a parliament with a majority of pro-independence parties, is instructive. Last week, Baltic-style human protest chains were strung from border to border. In Barcelona, Catalonian flags hang down from every other terraced window; a few months ago, its Nou Camp stadium was filled to 90,000-capacity, with patriots cheering on artists performing in Catalan.

The everyday mainstream usage of the national language, plus clear memories of an authoritarian Spanish state – hardly dimmed by current threats from Madrid, challenging the legitimacy of any referendum – gives Catalonian independence a historical clarity and focus.

Scotland is different. More residents speak Urdu than Gaelic: and the "Scots language" is more alive in the schtick of comedians than it is a potential standardised tongue. The level of Scottish national disaffection with the parent state is also more diffuse, more nuanced – a result of three centuries where common endeavours (empire, world wars, the welfare settlement, even a residual royalism) overlaid any resentments rooted in relative economic poverty, or land dispossession.

So it's not just damper up here but more decorous, too. In contrast to frustrated Catalans, we have a gentlemanly and legally watertight referendum – both Alex Salmond and David Cameron won an "innovation award" for it last week from the Political Studies Association.

The SNP leader can happily make a speech about the "five unions" that he would like to see an independent Scotland retain – sterling as a currency, Nato and EU membership, the monarchy under the Commonwealth, and the "social union" (the last interpreting "Britishness" as meaning "Scandinavian/Nordic", the undeniable mutual experience of nations on a shared land mass). Only the "political" union, in Salmond's view, needs radically changing.

Yet if we've learned anything from the first year of the campaign, it's that there's a healthy political debate to be had within the pro-yes movement, as much as with supporters of the union. (It's best to avert one's eyes from the ideological car crash of the Tory-Labour-Lib Dem platforms that comprise Better Together, the offical no campaign.)

Under the broad umbrellas of all-and-no-party organisations like Yes Scotland, and others like Radical Independence Conference and the artists' movement National Collective, vigorous discussions across positions (admittedly, mostly from the soft centre-left to the radical green-left) are producing real policy innovation.

Common Weal, launched by the foundation named after the late Clydeside radical Jimmy Reid, is an attempt to draw direct lessons from the success of the Nordic nations, and imagine it as the norm of a future Scotland. It promotes a high-wage, high-value economy, powered by an active and thoroughgoing democracy – and aims to provide a counter to some of the "tax-competitive" and mogul-tickling tendencies of the SNP leadership.

Indeed, SNP councillors recently signed up to Common Weal in their entirety. It's also worth recalling that the recent SNP party conference vote to change policy and advocate Nato membership (conditional on being able to remove Trident from Scottish waters) was toughly debated and only narrowly won on the hawkish side.

The Scottish government's white paper on independence, due in November, is often invoked as the moment when all the queries and anxieties of that middle third of "don't knows" – unsure about the coherence of a Scottish nation-state, or about the continuity of their lives thereafter – will be answered. Yet what may be most inspiring about it is the degree to which it makes clear that the SNP's vision of a functioning independent Scotland is always subject to democratic change. It will be an institutional settlement, with a constitutional spirit running through it (and indeed, the opportunity to crowdsource a new constitution itself).

Thus the place to watch for action on the yes side over the coming year is its huge network of community organisations. These are where the nuts and bolts of the arguments for independence will be sifted through, the structures tested, tightened and rebuilt, in discussion and with conviviality. Watch also for the role of artists and creatives at this local level. This constituency is wired to cope with confident leaps into the early dawn (thus their general support for independence), and relishes the opportunity to engage with those who face both ways on the question.

What the no camp doesn't realise is that the real depth of the current yes campaign lies in its ambition to revitalise citizenship itself in Scotland. What could divert the attentions of work-to-consume Scots, living under the same challenges to their spirit levels as any other developed nation, and just as potentially indifferent to any political appeal beyond the daily grind?

How about a movement that almost has a Gandhian undertone to it – urging you to "be the Scotland you wish to see", and rekindle a basic sense of engagement with, and optimism about, the public realm? We may do this rationally and modestly, with a fistful of complex considerations in our minds. But a yes for Scottish independence will be a historic (and world-inspiring) event. A quiet start to something quite amazing.